Matt Cunningham is an artist and writer from London. This is his first published comic strip.When did you get into drawing?
I started drawing comics as a teenager, when I worked a Saturday job in WH Smith. I drew an elaborate and very bloody series called Murder the Management – there were three volumes, plus a Christmas special. I don't think I was very happy there.Which artists have inspired you, or have made you feel like you're following in the tradition of them?
Well, at the moment the background on my computer is a series of Little Nemo in Slumberland pages, an American comic from the 1910s and 20s. Each version of it basically tells the same, very simple story – but the variations of that story are incredible, each one just amazingly imaginative and beautiful and intricate. Someone's collected them all online in hi-res; I'm spending a lot of time glaring at those. As for more general, longstanding inspiration, it's probably just really obvious things, like Chris Ware, Posy Simmonds, the Beano …'April '96' has such a strong sense of nostalgia for the 90s, and for teenage life. Where does your interest in that come from?
It's definitely nostalgic – and I guess a bit about nostalgia too. I drew this page as a print for my friend Kate, whom I met 20 years ago in the way described in the comic. We had a meet-cute! But I think the strip's developing now into something longer, and I don't think nostalgia's a bad place to start. After all, it's not just a happy feeling, is it? Or even a kind of cute happy-sad one. Implicitly, nostalgia's about measuring up your present against the possibilities that present had in the past – so there's regret in there too, and resentment and failure and funnies and hope. All rich material. Mortification. I think I'd feel much happier about all of my memories if I somehow wasn't in them, pratting about.Where can we see more of your work?
I'm on Instagram as 'mjosephcunningham'. I'm going to be posting a story over advent for Christmas, a panel-a-day thing. It's a silly story that's now grown ridiculously complex. Actually, my old manager from Smiths makes an appearance, but really only because I know how to draw him. Wherever he is now, I don't wish him any harm.
I started drawing comics as a teenager, when I worked a Saturday job in WH Smith. I drew an elaborate and very bloody series called Murder the Management – there were three volumes, plus a Christmas special. I don't think I was very happy there.Which artists have inspired you, or have made you feel like you're following in the tradition of them?
Well, at the moment the background on my computer is a series of Little Nemo in Slumberland pages, an American comic from the 1910s and 20s. Each version of it basically tells the same, very simple story – but the variations of that story are incredible, each one just amazingly imaginative and beautiful and intricate. Someone's collected them all online in hi-res; I'm spending a lot of time glaring at those. As for more general, longstanding inspiration, it's probably just really obvious things, like Chris Ware, Posy Simmonds, the Beano …'April '96' has such a strong sense of nostalgia for the 90s, and for teenage life. Where does your interest in that come from?
It's definitely nostalgic – and I guess a bit about nostalgia too. I drew this page as a print for my friend Kate, whom I met 20 years ago in the way described in the comic. We had a meet-cute! But I think the strip's developing now into something longer, and I don't think nostalgia's a bad place to start. After all, it's not just a happy feeling, is it? Or even a kind of cute happy-sad one. Implicitly, nostalgia's about measuring up your present against the possibilities that present had in the past – so there's regret in there too, and resentment and failure and funnies and hope. All rich material. Mortification. I think I'd feel much happier about all of my memories if I somehow wasn't in them, pratting about.Where can we see more of your work?
I'm on Instagram as 'mjosephcunningham'. I'm going to be posting a story over advent for Christmas, a panel-a-day thing. It's a silly story that's now grown ridiculously complex. Actually, my old manager from Smiths makes an appearance, but really only because I know how to draw him. Wherever he is now, I don't wish him any harm.